A new philosophy of aesthetics was advanced in the 1870s by the Oxford critic Walter Pater, who said that the function of art is to provide pleasure; it is this pleasure-giving quality of art that we refer to as beauty. His arguments widened the scope of what could be considered art, and led to the belief that some individuals have an elevated ability to perceive beauty in everyday objects. Notwithstanding the excesses of some of his followers, his language and arguments provided pure mathematicians with a new way to present themselves: they should be considered as artists, albeit that the aesthtic quality of their work was evident only to a small coterie. This attempt to transform pure mathematicians into artists succeeded, as criticism of them and their discipline became increasingly rare, and they gained a new confidence in referring to the aesthetic qualities of a mathematical demonstration. By the beginning of the twentieth century the relative statuses of pure and applied mathematicians began to reverse, wth pure mathematicians who were the authors of 'deep theorems' being the most honoured, because they had the greatest insight into the hidden beauty of pure mathematics.